No weight control program can succeed by dominating your consciousness with food and weight. A successful program must develop a conditioned response to regulate eating automatically, without having to "stop and think about it." The trick is to condition the core hurt (inadequacy or unworthiness that makes you want to overeat) to stimulate core value - a sense of yourself

External regulation of emotions is a no-win venture, even if you go about it through seduction rather than coercion. It’s just too hard to regulate an internal system by controlling external conditions. That’s like a thermostat trying to keep it comfortable in the room by blowing warm or cool air around the outside perimeter of the building.

We've perverted the natural function of aggression in social animals, which is secondarily self-protection but primarily protection of loved ones. (You'll get more aggressive if I attack your wife or children than if I attack you.) Now aggression primarily protects the ego, not loved ones.

All alarm systems, negative feelings included, are calibrated to give false positives. You don’t want a smoke alarm that doesn’t go off until the house is in flames; you want it to go off when there’s just a little smoke. The Toddler brain functions as if the smoke alarm is the fire, instead of a signal that a fire might possibly exist.

Children learn emotion regulation by modeling, not by what parents tell them. Anger is an attribution of blame. If parents are blamers, children, especially high testosterone boys, are more likely to have anger problems. (Testosterone doesn't cause anger but amplifies it considerably.)